The work analyses the political-ideological dispute between the market land reform model (MLRM) of the World Bank (WB) and redistributive agrarian reform. We argue that the core of this dispute lies in the fact that the MLRM was created to substitute the expropriative and redistributive role of the State. We show that in all countries where it was implemented (South Africa, Colombia, Guatemala and Brazil), the alleged advantages attributed to the MLRM over agrarian reform did not materialize.